Open up your CEO’s innovating thinking to make the jump
Innovation must rely increasingly on interconnected organizations organized around a central focal point of value and impact. An ecosystem design should be in thought and design so that organizations can act differently on strategies, business models, leadership, and customer engagement to build new value and worth.
If we fail to recognize that innovation is vital to our business, to sustain it, and to enable it to grow, we eventually die. Today, more than ever, it is becoming an evolving collective endeavour. Increasingly, we are faced with growing complexities and challenges to resolve.
We need to foster collaboration between individuals, organizations, and institutions, creating a symphony of ideas that resonate far beyond the boundaries of any single actor.
I have been undertaking a significant revamp of two pivotal frameworks I have been building in the past twelve months that move towards Ecosystem thinking and design.
Part of this has been a renaming. I explained the Composable Innovation Enterprise concept in several posts last year. I have now shortened it to the Composable Innovation frame within its new positioning role, which is more central to applying the thinking towards Innovation Ecosystems.
I have been asking Google’s Gemini a series of questions about innovation, how it has evolved in the past twenty-five years, and where it seems to be heading.
This is the third and final part of my questioning on looking towards the future and how innovation will evolve, starting from the original thread of looking over the evolution of innovation in the past twenty-five years, since 1999.
This post is about what has evolved and then what will evolve. There is a very different innovation pathway ahead of us, and then I touch upon a vastly different future at the end of this post.
Innovation will evolve very differently, linked tightly to the organization’s future design, no more cutting it loose, housed separately or outside the core.
I have have been looking back at innovation and how it has changed over the last twenty-five years. In a series of three posts, I have asked Google’s Gemini to answer five questions to track and trace the progress innovation has made and where it seems to be heading.
This is the second post looking more at collaboration and idealization and how and what has helped it evolve in this period. Hopefully, this change has enabled better value creation and learning how to innovate. (First post here)
So this post, in a series of three, looks at the answers given by Google’s Gemini on how collaboration and ideation evolved the organization’s ability to adapt and what helped.
In January of this year, I introduced the thinking behind “the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem needs.” This framework was outlined initially in a series of seven posts on my dedicated ecosystem posting site.
On this posting site here, I provided numerous supporting posts in “given” areas of Business Ecosystems that covered some areas I felt were important explainers. This filled a number of critical gaps in building a more comprehensive understanding of Business Ecosystems in their different parts for providing a “fitting” context.
If you go to the “Explore My Insights and Thinking” tag shown above, you will see there are two files you can download that provide all of these posts in a PDF format.
“The Hierarchy of Business Ecosystem Needs presents a holistic approach to navigating the complexities of the modern business landscape. It emphasizes collaborative ecosystems as the key to unlocking untapped potential, driving sustained growth, and achieving collective prosperity.
I have been looking at different ways to pitch Business Ecosystems recently for some evolving and hopefully sustaining work.
You can “pitch” to clients in several different ways. Some know their problems, while others don’t recognize them until they are prompted or confronted. If you have a tried and tested way to solve problems, you can become a little blocked from considering something that looks on the surface as radically different, but underneath might be the pathway (to salvation) for new sustaining solutions.
Pitching business ecosystems has to gain attention and be seen as a (radically) different way to tackle growing complex and challenging business problems. The problem for many is that it does “confront” them in considering the multiple layers of what this might mean regarding changes in mindset, organization thinking, and design, rethinking trust by opening up to others outside your existing network and adapting to a new way of design and thinking.
I will tackle different approaches over several posts, but first, let’s look at organizational strategies and the distinct advantages Business Ecosystems can have compared to the more traditional ways of tackling challenges today.
By incorporating Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block, businesses can create a dynamic and expansive innovation ecosystem beyond internal and partnership and certain collaborative boundaries.
This approach supports a culture of continuous learning, adaptation, and external collaboration, positioning the organization for sustained success in an ever-evolving business landscape that recognizes and learns how to collaborate and co-create, moving towards recognizing the value of Business Ecosystems.
Embracing Open Innovation Strategies as the next building block complements the collaborative nature of Business Ecosystems and broadens the innovation landscape out into a world of new possibilities where collaboration, co-creation and cooperation become realised for building and delivering products, concepts, and services that have new unique value and impact.
When looking at radically different thinking and design in business, where Ecosystems become central, you need to ask yourself what industries would benefit from such an alternative design and thinking due to the changing complexities and challenges they are facing.
Are these pressures in their known and emerging markets posing future threats for businesses and whole market sectors?
Markets today are radically changing and are more demanding. The growing need to face growing complexity and challenges constantly unsettles the normal.
The value of opening up and embracing Ecosystems in design and thinking is that you can attract diverse expertise and knowledge into fresh partnerships and collaborations that can piece together radically different value propositions and shift competitors’ positioning.
I decided this posting site to be the principal supporting site for building different insights and understandings of Ecosystems. The main framework around the Hierarchy of Business Ecosystems Needs is over on www.ecosystems4innovating.com; in a series of detailed posts on each layer of the Ecosystem construct, take a look at each part in explanations of why each Ecosystem is interconnected and feeds the others.
On this site, I have been exploring issues associated with building Ecosystems, each valuable to read, such as collective learning, resistance, values of interconnected layers, barriers, a blueprint and a base post of “Why Ecosystems” and illustrating where and how ecosystems think and design are emerging.
Scroll down the home page or enter the topic in the search box to find these ready to read on this posting site. They provide a sound basis for considering Ecosystems by working through the views offered.
In this post, I provide different industries’ challenges that lend themselves to Ecosystem thinking and Design.
How can we realize the power of ecosystem thinking and design and its growing value to enterprises? This will come through collective learning, exchanging and exploring a diversity of opinions and experiences. Achieving alternative perspectives enables a level of discovery that enables innovation
it is the need to embrace new organizational design that Ecosystem thinking needs to be considered for building a different approach to the new business needs based on the recognition that the way we approach management in markets is going through radical change.
Today, we face fast-changing markets, constant change and growing complexity; customers are opening up to different and diverse experiences, and it is learning and gaining new understanding and knowledge that will give us the more significant potential to expand and build out new value and growth opportunities.
Ecosystem thinking and design require continuous collective learning.We require different conversations.
Resistance to Business Ecosystems does need to be broken down and addressed to realize the power of Ecosystem thinking and design and its growing value to Enterprises.
So why are we not doing this today?
Adopting any business ecosystem-centric approach involves a significant shift in mindset, culture, and organizational structures.
While some forward-thinking organizations have embraced aspects of ecosystem thinking, there are several challenges and barriers that hinder widespread adoption.
In the suggested Hierarchy of Business Ecosystems, recognizing the value of an interconnected series of (dedicated) Ecosystems that build out innovation, business, dynamic flexibility, and connected enterprise layers does need to address the natural instincts to resist the adoption of business ecosystems in the fear of sharing what we know, against what we often don’t know as it is outside our restricted view.
The question is whether we need to recognise the opposite; it is the need to embrace building a different approach to the new business needs of fast-changing markets, constant change and growing complexity and opening up to different and diverse experience and knowledge gives us the greater potential to expand and build out new potential opportunities.